Venus: -4 Days Till Inferior Conjunction

March 24, 2009

Venus is getting harder and harder to see as it approaches inferior conjunction with the Sun. Due to breezy conditions in Tucson and all of the dust it kicked up, I was unable to locate Venus Monday afternoon. Luckily Bob Lunsford had better luck. Below are 2 pictures he took with his Celestron 9.25″ SCT and a Canon PowerShot digital camera.

This afternoon I was successful in finding Venus. At the time of the last observation (Mar. 24.83 UT), Venus was only 9.7 degrees from the Sun. The disk of Venus is now 59″.1 arc seconds (almost a full arc minute) across but only 1.4% of it is illuminated by the Sun. The crescent of Venus appears thicker in my Mar. 24th images compared to some of the previous dates because the seeing (turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere) was much worse today. I just could not get a clear shot.